I applied for the IBM off campus drive with a referral code. One of my relatives is placed in IBM Kolkata as the Software Engineer. I sent him my details and documents, and he provided me the IBM referral code through which I applied for the interview. I opted for the post of System Engineer at Global Business Services (GBS). I received an invitation email from IBM to attend the placement drive.

Written Round

There were three sections in the written paper,

Quantitative Ability

Number Series

Business Communication Test

There were 18 questions on the Quantitative Ability and 18 questions on the Number series. There was a time limit of 2 min 15 seconds for every question and if the time limit exceeds the question will be auto-submitted. The difficulty level of the questions was moderate to high. The PrepInsta practice papers were a great help while preparing for these sections. In the Business Communication Test, there were 22 MCQ questions and the total time limit was 20 minutes. The difficulty level of all the questions was moderate. There were no reading comprehension passages. Instead, there were questions related to active /passive voice, synonyms, antonyms, and fill in the blanks. There were some questions related to effective email writing.

After clearing the Written Round, I was selected for the face to face interview.

Face to Face Interview

I reached the Bangalore campus for the interview rounds. There I was informed that there would be two face to face interview rounds:

Technical Round

HR Round

Technical Round

I was very nervous before the interview, as only the candidates who cleared this round would be shortlisted for the HR round. My cousin told me to prepare well for this round and be thorough with the resume. As I entered the cabin, the interviewer was seated there. He asked me for my resume. I handed over my resume to him, and he started asking questions related to C, C++, and database.

What are linear and non-linear data structures?

What is an inner join and an outer join?

Write the logic of merge sort.

What is an LRU cache?

Is this tree BST or not?

Explain your final year project

Can you draw an ER diagram of the project?

Is there any difference between having and where clause?

Explain the ACID properties.

Write the query to print duplicate rows in a table.

The interview continued for an hour. I was hoping for a positive result. The results for the Technical round were declared, and I cleared this round and moved further for the final round.

HR Round

After the technical round, I was quite confident for this round. I entered the cabin and greeted the HR. He asked me general questions related to my interests, career plans, etc.

Introduce yourself?

You had a gap of eight months after your graduation, what were you doing?

Why do you want to join IBM?

Any plans of doing M.B.A. or Mtech?

Rate yourself on a scale of 1 – 10 in teamwork.

Where do you see yourself in next two years?

The interview continued for 15 minutes. I was asked to submit the Xerox copies of my documents for further verifications. After a week I received an email from IBM that I have been selected for the profile of System Engineer. That was the happiest day of my life.